Croquet & Crushes

Summer. The season of sun dresses and sandals. Lily plans to spend a few months with her father, but she finds herself tempted into an indulgent, dangerous world. Lily Czarnecki is spending the summer with her father, a rising New York businessman. His new membership to the country club lifestyle of the elite takes Lily for a spin as she befriends and becomes infatuated with the glitz, glamor, and guys. From country homes to penthouses, Lily finds herself questioning who she is ... and what she is capable of ... and what's so wrong with being a little bad?
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Chapters:

Since I had last seen him, my father had shaved his beard. Ever
since I could remember, his jaw had hid behind curly brown hair.
When he would come in from shoveling the driveway, his beard
would be peppered with snow. He would scope me up and twirl me,
and at first, I'd be scared, but then he'd pull me into his
flannel shirt. Even though it was itchy, it would be warm and
smell like him. I'm eighteen now, and I still remember those
moments because there were so many of them. I don't like my dad
without his beard.
I don't like how a lot of things are now: the move, the
discovery, the divorce, the shuffling between the extremes of my
now torn life - Mom's and Dad's. Mom had moved back to St. Paul
but not back to our old house. No where near it actually. She
said there were too many memories. Dad had stayed in New York,
and even though Mom and I had left, he bought a bigger apartment.
Swankier was the word I overheard his realtor use. He could
afford it now.
The move, the discovery, and the divorce were all events my mom
lumped into one single event. She called it the Change, always
certain to emphasize the need to capitalize it. Dad had been a
professor at a college so small and private I was shocked people
knew about it and applied there. He taught communications. His
specialty was the news, so I was never interested in his work.
Apparently, he was good at it because four years ago, he was
hired by NYU.
So, we became New Yorkers. Not really, actually. Sure, we lived
in Manhattan, and I went to school there, but nothing was
familiar. We had to find new restaurants to like and - more
importantly - afford. Whenever I went to the grocery stores to
get stuff, I wandered up and down the aisles like a blind
tourist. The accents were thick, the subways smelled, and the
smell of garbage lingered over everything. Back in Minnesota, our
yard rolled right into a forest. At night, it was silent, and
sometimes I wondered if the whole world around my bed had fallen
away. No such luck in New York.
My mom took it harder than I did because it wasn't easy for her
to make friends. She's pretty, but not in the way she was
expected to be in the Lower West Side. The other professors'
wives scoffed at her, and after a while, she stopped going to my
dad's faculty functions. I could make friends at school and
around the neighborhood, but my mom was holed up in our
apartment, going from one small room to the next like she was
trapped in a crazy pinball machine.
The three of us only endured three semesters there. I had started
to suspect my dad was doing something. He was not particularly
discreet. I think my mom chose not to see it at first, but as it
went on, my father became sloppier about it. Maybe he was
starting to be proud of it and was trying to provoke my mom.
Since we moved, my father had made a point to switch accents. He
dressed in crisp dress shirts, even on weekends. He had started
working out and spent a lot of time at presentations and forums
at night. It was like watching a predictable movie that, for some
reason, thought it was original, so it drew out its action. When
the climax finally came, there was as much angry about its delay
as there was about the fact that my dad had been cheating on my
mom.
The divorce was over pretty quick. That was probably because my
mom just wanted to leave. She and I were back in Minnesota for
Christmas. The Change was complete. My parents worked out a
complicated schedule that involved me getting tons of frequent
flier miles. Some nights, I dreamed about taking all those miles
and flying somewhere plush and exotic, somewhere that I wouldn't
be bothered by my parents. I knew places like that existed, but I
couldn't decide which destination I trusted.
Now, the summer before college, I was in my dad's BMW speeding
along the LIE. The clock on the dashboard read 5:05. Outside the
car, the sky was turning gray, and I could make shapes out of the
trees and buildings. We had left his apartment hours ago, and I
had slept for most of the drive. When I turned to him, he looked
at me and smiled.
"Hey there, sleepy." He smiled. It was weird seeing his whole
face when he smiled. I missed seeing his cheeks lift his beard,
but his dark brown eyes still had a mischievous twinkle to them
that described his personality.
I murmured a reply, too groggy still to start up a
conversation.
"We're almost there," he said. "About an hour or so."
We were headed to a house he was renting for a few weeks. What I
learned my first summer in New York was that no New Yorkers spend
their summers in the city. I quickly smelled why. There was an
entire temporary expatriate population that emptied all the good
restaurants and stores, but tourists took their place. Now that
my dad was a professor who took blondes who wanted to be
actresses out for coffee, he could be fancy and summer in the
Hamptons.
"I'm really glad you're here," he said after a moment. The sudden
sound of his voice and the honesty in it shocked me. "Really
glad."
"Me, too." Those seemed like the right words to start off with.